Implementations of the claimed invention generally may relate to the field of noise detection, noise reduction, noise removal and in particular to noise estimation and reduction in images and/or video.
Reducing the noise artifact is an important factor in the field of video processing. On the receiving end of an image/video application, people usually apply noise reduction technique as part of the post-processing filtering to improve picture quality. Media processors may reduce noise artifact by using approaches that rely on motion compensation, motion adaptive, temporal or spatial filters. In particular, although the motion compensation approach may achieve a desired filtering effect, extensive amounts of computation and memory spending in the motion search may be required to determine the best temporal correlation to reduce the noise artifact. Motion adaptive and temporal approaches do not require the extensive motion search but may achieve similar levels of picture quality with a smart design of filtering.
Conventional motion adaptive noise reduction methods are unable to deliver superior visual quality due to the failure of proper estimating the amount of motion in a video sequence by taking the temporal difference without considering the local spatial content.